Designer terror-porn now in vogue

The horrific images of abuse at Abu Ghraib have been recycled in the name of fashion. By Chris Johnston.

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE purpose of these remarkable, disturbing pictures? Given they're in Vogue Italia, the primary purpose is to sell clothes. But disregard that truism for a second to consider them.

The cover of the magazine - the international bible of fashion, no less - features a rake-skinny, plague-pallored model undressing. Her skin so flawless and her mouth so blank she could be a mannequin. The setting is unmistakably an airport customs station. Two officers flank her, watching. Voyeurs; and we watch them watching her. One is only identifiable by his hairy arm and wristwatch. She looks at him, stern but impassive. He is dominant, she submissive.

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She's been stopped before a flight. Her exposed legs are the focus of the picture, which masquerades as surveillance. It's sexual, and odd, but also quite mundane, quite familiar.

Inside the magazine are more pictures from the series, titled State of Emergency, shot by eminent fashion photographer Steven Meisel. The cover is the most benign. The rest move through the cruel, the fetishistic, the misogynistic to the quasi-pornographic. All are firmly based on the new aesthetics of terrorism. As a group they add up to a post-9/11 erotic fantasy; they are terror-porn.

But are they a mockery of the notion of homeland security, mockery by exaggeration? Are they implying that we all now live with this kind of brutal fear, a kind of visual map of the new reality? Or are they just appropriating the settings and sentiments of the zeitgeist - the locked-down, cheerless, nostalgia-free airports, the innate threat of aircraft, the overzealous friskings, the terror police, and the glitchy CCTV scrutiny of all of the above?

Hard to say. Meisel, a 52-year-old American who did the pictures for Madonna's Sex book in 1992, has not and will not explain his thinking. In the fashion industry, so regularly accused of using dubious imagery - "heroin chic", say, or "corporate pedophilia" - there is little scrutiny. Why would there be? It's fashion. But however much or little he meant by them, this set of images amounts to the final appropriation of post 9-11 terror and paranoia into the mainstream.

The clothes are from Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Yves St Laurent and Calvin Klein, among others. The models are usually the captives, held against their will, but in several pictures they are the aggressors, death-maidens bearing arms against unseen infidels.

The key image is missing only a dirty hood and sinister electrical wires. It is clearly based on an Abu Ghraib picture, the infamous Iraqi prison for Saddam Hussein's political dissidents where shocking abuses by US soldiers were photographed, by the soldiers themselves, during the American occupation.

In it, a model is on her knees in a subway station. Her hands are subordinately clasped behind her head. Authority figures loom - one with a truncheon in his black leather glove, the other holding a ferocious dog. Her passport has spilled to the ground. An outlooker at an ATM is uninvolved.

Much has been made of the notorious Abu Ghraib pictures on a purely semiotic level. American critic Susan Sontag, in an essay called Regarding the Torture of Others, written just before she died, said the images were themselves pornographic, with their exploitative depictions of masturbation, exposed genitals and multiple humiliations. She likened them to Holocaust pictures or lynching pictures, the perpetrators gloating, the trophies helpless. The digital Abu Ghraib images were not to be saved and collected, however, but disseminated and circulated by email, for fun, Sontag wrote.

French theorist Jean Baudrillard saw them as an "obscene banality, the atrocious but banal degradation, not merely of the victims but of the amateur stage-managers of this pornographic parody of violence".

This is the confusion and indifference of living in a terrorist-age; what is good, what is evil? How complicit are we? Where next to turn? Is a broadcast, or a transmission - that beheading for example, that confession - real? How far can propaganda go?

What the Abu Ghraib images clearly do is fit right into the well-worn interface between porn and torture, both of which instinctively attract cameras, as does fashion, and as does, now, the grainy spectacles of terror. But I think it's a whole new idea again to recycle this kind of imagery in the name of commerce.

And it's not just commerce, but high-glamour. Author Brett Easton Ellis toyed with such tricks in his novel Glamorama, where supermodels became terrorists. And in 1970 British writer J.G. Ballard, who has long discussed the nexus between the police state, technology and sexual transgression, penned experimental odes to eroticised violence, "obscene mannequins" and disfigured beauty queens in The Atrocity Exhibition.

Post 9-11, popular culture has had to reflect new ways of thinking, such as threats either real or perceived, and also the opportunistic use of perceived threats by politicians. Bruce Springsteen's The Rising addresses the emotional fallout of the Twin Towers attacks in much the same way that filmmaker Oliver Stone's World Trade Centre does.

The best of it, Stone and Springsteen included, has been affirming. Bridge-building. Explanation. Not pandering to pro-American, pro-Hero propaganda, but real attempts to make some sense of the world we find ourselves in.

Now comes Vogue Italia and Steven Meisel. His shock tactics have worked. The clothes are illuminated. We look, we see. We see the splayed legs and discarded passport, the high-powered weapons. We see the prostrate model with a combat boot on her prone neck and her breasts tantalisingly near. We see the woman detained inside a plane in a kind of vision of hell - torches, dogs and sleeper holds. Then a female face hard against a windscreen, an airport X-ray machine and brooding customs in rubber gloves.

And then the one of the beautiful model on her knees, hands behind her head, recycled from Abu Ghraib, which itself recycled its ideas from the most horrible extremes of hardcore porn then sent them out into the world as instant jpegs. Nihilism, then, in a nutshell. Beauty degraded.